On Sat, 22 Feb 2003, Todd O'Bryan wrote:
>
> Why don't we just dump HTML and create a VML, a simple,
> straightforward, easy to parse, quick to render, Visual Markup
> Language.
We have. It's called XSL:FO and is about 18 months old:
http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/
> Maybe I've missed something entirely, and maybe there are good reasons
> to maintain HTML as the middle-man between content and visualization
The main use of HTML is for when it _isn't_ the middle man: i.e. when the
data itself is a structural document. In those cases, HTML is the
simplest, easiest, and most well supported language available.
That also happens to be the most common type of data on the Web.
For other uses, such as Music, Chemical formulae, Maths, Voice interaction
systems, etc, there are custom vocabularies: MusicXML, ChemML, MathML, and
VoiceXML, etc, respectively, for instance.
--
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"meow" /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
http://index.hixie.ch/ `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'